Im in the early planning stages of building a custom case and have a cooling question. I dont want to watercool for space and price concerns and this pc will be moving around alot. The Specs of the system would (currently) be: Core i7 860 Stock cooler (no overclocking, might later) Asus Micro ATX motherboard 4gb Ram, something high end with heat spreaders Nvidia GTX 460 or ATI 5830 1TB HD Slimline DVD burner One 2.5" hot swap bay. Corsair 650 Watt PSU My main question is will the fans be enough to keep the system cool. The case will be made out of aluminum and i currently plan alot of vents. I think the cpu and ram will be fine but the GPU and HDD will not have any sort of direct air flow which concerns me.
To save on noise I'd make the rear exhaust fan larger but that's ample cooling for that setup. The choice of CPU cooler is obviously important. Unless the vents you mentioned are asthetic, it is my opinion that they will hamper cooling. The fan layout, which is pretty much that of the antec series, basically creates a column of air. Adding vents in such a system means that air simply exits the case not having cooled the components. Open to debate, but vents tend to be on low end cases which only have exhaust fans and so need the vents to draw air through.
Thanks for the reply, the back fan has to be 80mm as there isnt enough space for anything bigger, i could add another 80mm next to it though. My fear was that there would be no flow around the HDD and GPU, and they would overheat. Are vents around them enough to keep them cool if there is alot of flow everywhere else.
One thing I note is that you seem to be using an X58 mobo on your design, but your specs are for a Lynnfield system. I would say that if you are going to be adding a side panel fan, make it a 120mm, and lower it a little, so it blows more air across the GPU. CPUs tend to benefit less from a side fan, especially if it's a tower cooler, rather than a cooler with the fan blowing down onto the chip. Is the system going to be sitting on its side like that, or sat more like a tower case?
Good point, +1. Its an interesting configuration, very space efficient, but how are you planning to direct the exhaust from the PSU?
I was wondering that myself. A little bit of ducting and ventilation for the rear of the PSU would help, and easy access to the power switch on the back of the PSU is always handy.
It looks to me like the PSU is going to be at the bottom of the case when standing as a tower with the power cable plugging in from the bottom. I know it is not usually suggested but you could reverse your PSU and have it sucking in air from the front of the GPU and around the HD?